Focus on Consistency and Variability in Your Workouts for Best Results

In one of my recent articles, I wrote about the truth that you must adjust your workout variables that make up your workout if you want to continuously get good results, whether it is losing weight, increase lean muscle mass, or toning up -- Exercise Variables for Overcoming Plateaus

While altering your workout variables is an central part of the victory of your training routine, your workouts shouldn’t be drastically different every time. If you are all over the place on each workout and never try to repeat and upgrade on percise exercises for percise set and rep schemes with percise rest intervals, then your body has no basis to improve on its present condition.

The best way to shape your workouts to get the best results is to be consistent and try to continually develop on a percise training approach for a precise time period. A time period of 4-8 weeks generally works best as your body will adapt to the percise training approach and progress will slow after this time period.

At this stage, it is time to change around some of your workout variables as I described in the "workout variables" article, and then remain consistent with your new workout routine for another 4-8 weeks. To refresh, some of these variables are the number of sets and reps of exercises, the order of exercises (sequence), training grouping (super-setting, circuit training, tri-sets, etc.), exercise style (multi-joint or single joint, free-weight or machine based), the number of exercises per workout, the amount of resistance, the time under tension, the base of stability (standing, seated, on stability ball, one-legged, etc.), the amount of work (sets x reps x distance moved), break periods between sets, repetition speed, range of motion, exercise angle (inclined, level, declined, bent over, upright, etc), exercising duration per workout, workout frequency per week, etc.

For example, let’s say you are working out with a routine where you are executing 10 sets of 3 reps for 6 different exercises grouped together in pairs (done as supersets) with 30 seconds rest between each superset and no rest between the 2 exercises inside the superset. If you are smart, I’m know you are tracking your improvement with a notebook (weights used, sets, and reps) to see how you are improving over time. Let’s say that after about 6 weeks, you find that you are no longer improving with that routine. Well, now it is time to change up your variables, and begin a new routine.

This time you take a classic 5 sets of 5 reps routine, but you group your exercises in tri-sets (three exercises performed back to back to back, and then repeated for the number of sets). This time you change the exercises in the tri-set with no rest between them, and then recover for 2 minutes in between each tri-set to completely recoup your strength levels.

There you have it, a couple examples of how to incorporate both cconsistency and variability into your training program to maximize your results.

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